India, Pakistan to reopen consulates

India and Pakistan have agreed to reopen consulates in their largest cities in the latest step to repair relations.

The nuclear-armed rivals have agreed to negotiate a final settlement to their half-century dispute over Kashmir.

Wrapping up their first talks in three years on Kashmir, the countries issued a joint statement pledging to "continue the sustained and serious dialogue to find a peaceful, negotiated final settlement" on the dispute.

The statement said the two countries would immediately restore staff at their main embassies and would reopen consulates in their largest cities, Bombay and Karachi.

Consulates in those cities were shut down in 1994.

The consulates will make travel easier for members of families that were broken up by the subcontinent's partition in 1947.

During the two day negotiations, the two countries had a "free exchange of views" on Kashmir, Indian Foreign Ministry spokesman Navtej Sarna said.

"Naturally, these proposals are going to be studied on both sides," he said.

The New Delhi meeting marks the first attempt to resolve the Kashmir dispute since June 2001, when India's then-prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf held a failed summit.

Mr Sarna said the two sides established a timeframe for future talks.

Their foreign secretaries, who led the delegations in New Delhi, are due to meet in the third week of August ahead of a previously scheduled meeting between the foreign ministers.

The statement said Pakistan and India would also formalise a standing agreement to notify each other of missile testing and would release all fishermen and other civilians who strayed into each other's territory.

Mr Sarna said the peace process would not be derailed by violence.

"It was underscored that terrorism is not good for India or Pakistan and we must work together to remove this scourge from our midst," he said.

India says all of Muslim-majority Kashmir is an integral part of its territory and accuses Pakistan of encouraging an insurgency against Indian rule that has claimed tens of thousands of lives since 1989.

Pakistan, which controls about a third of the disputed region, rejects the charges but calls the rebellion a "freedom struggle" and demands a plebiscite among Kashmiris, as called for by UN resolutions.

The dispute over the Himalayan region has been the trigger of two of the three wars between the two countries.

The two sides nearly went to war again over Kashmir in 2002 after an Islamic militant attack on the Indian Parliament which New Delhi alleged was carried out by Pakistani-backed rebel groups.

The peace process was relaunched in April 2003 by Mr Vajpayee, whose Hindu nationalists lost power in elections last month.

India's new left-leaning government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has vowed to continue to seek peace but will face a Hindu nationalist opposition likely to criticise any major concessions over Kashmir.